Society's Child

OECD warns that global economic expansion is slowing down due to trade tensions

RT
Thu, 20 Sep 2018 16:33 UTC

Expansion in the global economy is slowing down as uncertainties intensify, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has warned.

Its latest economic outlook for both 2018 and 2019 was less positive than it had predicted in May. Escalating trade tensions, tightening financial conditions in emerging markets and political risks could further undermine strong and sustainable medium-term growth worldwide, the thinktank said.

"The expansion may now have peaked," it said, adding: "Global growth is projected to settle at 3.7 percent in 2018 and 2019, marginally below pre-crisis norms, with downside risks intensifying."

The OECD has also noted rising differences across countries, in contrast to the broad-based expansion seen in the latter part of 2017 and earlier this year.

Saudi Arabia bans 300,000 Palestinians from Makkah

Middle East Monitor
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 15:41 UTC

© Ali Jadallah/Anadolu Agency
A prospective pilgrim woman prays as she waits to cross Rafah border crossing before moving forward to the Muslims' Holiest city of Mecca of Saudi Arabia for making a pilgrimage, in Rafah, Gaza on 14 August, 2017

Saudi Arabia issued new directives banning up to 300,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon from performing pilgrimage, Alarab.qa reported yesterday.

Reporting the Palestinian Institution for Human Rights (Shahed), the Qatari news website said that Saudi Arabia stopped issuing visas for Palestinian refugees in Lebanon who do not hold a Palestinian Authority (PA) passport.

Shahed reported travel agents were informed by the Saudi embassy in Lebanon not to accept applications from Palestinians who do not have PA passports.

The rights group said it was worried about the "sudden" Saudi decision, calling on Kingdom to identify its reasons which have "dangerous consequences" on the Palestinian refugees and their future.

Small potatoes: Session's DOJ fines housekeeping company for importing foreign workers rather than hiring Americans

John Binder
Breitbart
Tue, 18 Sep 2018 00:00 UTC

© SPENCER PLATT VIA GETTY IMAGES
the DOJ is requiring Palmetto to pay $42,000 in civil penalties, as well as setting aside $35,000 in lost wages for the American workers who were passed over in favor of imported foreign workers.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions' Department of Justice (DOJ) has fined a housekeeping company after revealing that they gamed the H-2B visa program to import foreign workers instead of hiring qualified Americans.

The DOJ settlement with Palmetto Beach Hospitality LLC is the fourth settlement by Sessions' Protecting U.S. Workers Initiative where companies across the United States have been fined and penalized for importing foreign workers when there were qualified, ready to work Americans for the job.

In the latest case of anti-American discrimination investigated by the Justice Department, Palmetto illegally ignored the applications of American workers who had applied for housekeeping positions.

Instead, Palmetto imported foreign workers to take the housekeeping jobs through the H-2B visa program, which allows businesses to import foreigners to take blue-collar jobs. Palmetto, according to the investigation, claimed that it could not find Americans to do the jobs, even though Americans had applied for the available positions.

Comment: Going after the little guys to give the appearance of actually stopping the abuse of visa programs? When will the DOJ attempt to end the gaming of the system by corporate giants?

EU regulators open anti-trust investigation into Amazon business practices

Tony Romm and Abha Bhattarai
Chicago Tribune
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 19:40 UTC

© Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg
Margrethe Vestager, competition commissioner of the European Commission, in Paris on Nov. 21. (Marlene Awaad/Bloomberg)

Europe's antitrust regulators have opened a preliminary probe of Amazon.com to see whether the e-commerce giant has stifled smaller competitors who sell clothing, toys and other goods through its website, marking the region's latest inquiry into the business practices of a U.S. tech giant.

The concern at hand is whether Amazon's use of sales data from third-party merchants gives it a leg up in selling its own products, said Margrethe Vestager, the European Union's competition chief, on Wednesday. More than half of Amazon's sales now come from third-party merchants that do business on the company's site, as the retailer aggressively recruits small and medium-size sellers to join its marketplace. (Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.)

"The question here is about the data," Vestager said at a news conference. "If you as Amazon get the data from the smaller merchants that you host ... do you then also use this data to do your own calculations on what is the new big thing? What is it that people want? What kind of offers do they like to receive? What makes them buy things?"

Amazon declined to comment.

Comment: Amazon's relationship with its third-party sellers has been described as 'predatory'. It tracks their transactions and will begin selling many of their most popular items itself. Amazon also uses the transaction information to extract an ever larger cut of their sellers revenue. See:

New Mexico sheriff furious over secrecy surrounding FBI's mysterious closure of Sunspot Observatory

Sputnik
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 22:01 UTC

Questions remain even after the Sunspot Solar Observatory in New Mexico was reopened following its mysterious closure by the FBI, and the local sheriff seems to have not given up on getting answers.

"I think it's chicken sh*t the way the FBI handled it. I have a responsibility to protect my citizens," Otero County Sheriff Benny House told ABC 7 Monday. "I think it's paramount that we know what the threat is so we can provide safety."

The observatory, and the post office on the same property, were mysteriously shut down on September 6, Sputnik News reported. At the time, House said "there was a Blackhawk helicopter, a bunch of people around antennas and work crews on towers, but nobody would tell us anything."

The sheriff said the FBI asked his team for help evacuating, but when he was up there, he couldn't perceive any threats. "We hung out for a little while; then we left. No reason for us to be there. Nobody would tell us what we're supposed to be watching out for."

The organization that runs facility - the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) - has been reticent about the situation from the get-go. Spokeswoman Shari Lifson said that it was AURA's decision to evacuate, but that she wasn't even sure when the facility was vacated.

Comment: Previously:

Corbyn-supporting group bans Sun reporters from Liverpool festival

RT
Thu, 20 Sep 2018 12:17 UTC

© Action Images / Jason Cairnduff / Reuters
Liverpool FC fans holding up a sign protesting against The Sun newspaper in relation to the Hillsborough disaster

A number of British journalists have hit out at the Corbyn-supporting Momentum group for banning Sun reporters from attending a festival in Liverpool, claiming it's "censorship" and likening the ban to the actions of Donald Trump.

Journalists from a number of mainstream news outlets reacted angrily to news that The World Transformed (TWT), a festival organised by pro-Jeremy Corbyn group Momentum, has announced that they are banning Sun newspaper journos from attending their event in Liverpool.

TWT cite the false claims made by the Murdoch-owned Sun during its reporting of the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool football fans were unlawfully killed, as their reason for what they say is a boycott.

Medicine's financial contamination

The New York Times
Fri, 14 Sep 2018 00:01 UTC

The fall from grace last week of Dr. José Baselga, the former chief scientific officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, illuminated a longstanding problem of modern medicine: Potentially corrupting payments by drug and medical device makers to influential people at research hospitals are far more common than either side publicly acknowledges.

Dr. Baselga, a giant in cancer research whose work led to the discovery of the lifesaving drug Herceptin, resigned on Thursday after The New York Times and ProPublica reported that he had repeatedly failed to properly disclose millions in industry payments.

Decades of research and real world examples have shown that such entanglements can distort the practice of medicine in ways big and small. Even little gifts have been found to influence doctors' prescribing habits and their perceptions of a given company's products. Larger payments have been shown to affect the design of clinical trials and the reporting of trial results, among other things. And such financial entanglements have proved devastating to individual patients - and to society at large. The opioid epidemic, to take one recent example, was partly spread by doctors who were persuaded to ignore warning bells and prescribe these drugs liberally by companies that showered them with gifts and consulting fees.

Comment: The issue of corruption in medicine is huge, and the consequences for patients is largely incalculable. Until some steps are taken, like the ones suggested above, the cycle of corruption will continue and patients will continue to suffer, while public confidence in the medical system continues to erode.

See also:

Gunman dead, 4 injured in Pennsylvania court office shooting

RT
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 19:24 UTC

One person has been killed and four others injured following a shooting at a Pennsylvania court office, according to local authorities.

The shooting occurred at the offices of Magisterial District Judge Daniel Shimshock.

At least four people have been hospitalized and one has been pronounced dead at the scene, a Fayette County Emergency Management spokesperson told media. Unconfirmed reports suggest that the deceased person was the gunman.

Local resident Rosa Goff, who was waiting for a hearing at the court, told the Observer-Reporter that she saw a man chasing a woman toward the municipal building and firing multiple times, before running past her into the building.

"He was shooting at everyone," she said.

Comment: See also:

And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Florida School Mass Shooting: Gun Control, Mental Illness and the Criminal Mind

Hackers mine bitcoin & other cryptos using leaked spy tool from US government

RT
Wed, 19 Sep 2018 17:07 UTC

Bitcoin, monero and other popular cryptocurrencies are being mined by fraudsters who use EternalBlue, the US National Security Agency (NSA) hacking tool that was leaked last year, according to a recent report.

The report, published by the Cyber Threat Alliance (CTA), says detected cases of illicit cryptocurrency mining have skyrocketed to 459 percent in 2018 compared to last year. The surge is linked to the leak of EternalBlue, a tool to exploit vulnerabilities in outdated Microsoft Windows-based systems, the report says.

EternalBlue was leaked by the Shadow Brokers hacking group in April 2017. The leaked NSA exploit was then used in the notorious WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware attacks. Microsoft accused the US government of "stockpiling" cyber weapons for facilitating attacks.

Comment: See also:

Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Bitcoin, Gold and the Cashless Society

Palestinian parents who tried to stop son's attack on Israeli are set to be punished for his crime

Maureen Clare Murphy
Electronic Intifada
Mon, 17 Sep 2018 09:05 UTC

© Wisam Hashlamoun APA images
Palestinians inspect the damage after Israeli forces demolished a home belonging to the family of a Palestinian assailant in the West Bank village of Yatta, south of Hebron, 4 August 2016.

Israeli forces raided a home belonging to the family of a Palestinian teen after he stabbed and fatally injured a man in a settlement on Sunday afternoon.

Occupation forces mapped the house in Yatta, near the West Bank city of Hebron, overnight Monday in preparation for its demolition. The military published a video of its soldiers doing so:

Since late 2015 Israel has accelerated the demolitions of the family residences of Palestinians alleged to have attacked Israelis, a form of collective punishment Israel never applies to Jewish perpetrators.

Such collective punishment measures violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and other international laws and thus are war crimes.

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Society's Child

OECD warns that global economic expansion is slowing down due to trade tensions

Saudi Arabia bans 300,000 Palestinians from Makkah

Small potatoes: Session's DOJ fines housekeeping company for importing foreign workers rather than hiring Americans

EU regulators open anti-trust investigation into Amazon business practices

New Mexico sheriff furious over secrecy surrounding FBI's mysterious closure of Sunspot Observatory

Corbyn-supporting group bans Sun reporters from Liverpool festival

Medicine's financial contamination

Gunman dead, 4 injured in Pennsylvania court office shooting

Hackers mine bitcoin & other cryptos using leaked spy tool from US government

Palestinian parents who tried to stop son's attack on Israeli are set to be punished for his crime

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